LaCie Debuts Largest Thunderbolt RAID

LACIE 5BIG THUNDERBOLT SERIES – With speeds up to 785MB/s, immense five-disk capacity up to 20TB, and LaCie proven reliability, the 5big Thunderbolt Series is the perfect complement to a Thunderbolt-compatible computer for professional creative workflows. It also features dual Thunderbolt ports for daisy chaining and near-silent dual cooling. Starting at $1,199.00.

LaCie Announces High-Performance 5big NAS Pro for Small Businesses

LACIE 5BIG NAS PRO – The LaCie 5big NAS Pro, powered by Intel’s dual-core 2.13GHz processor and LaCie’s NAS OS 3, is the go-to solution for small business storage needs. Thanks to hybrid cloud technology, it lets users collaborate effortlessly using a single interface for both network/cloud storage as well as remote access. It also lets admins control folder access on the cloud and on the NAS. All with complete data security thanks to industry-best cloud encryption and novice-friendly RAID. Starting at $549.00.

LaCie and Starck Craft Limited Edition Hard Drive

LACIE BLADE RUNNER – Imagined by world-famous designer Philippe Starck, the LaCie Blade Runner combines a sharp, cage-like enclosure surrounded by an almost anthropomorphic, liquid metal interior. Its 4TB drive and high-speed USB 3.0 interface deliver more than enough performance to handle even the most data-intensive tasks. With only 9,999 produced, the LaCie Blade Runner is a limited edition hard drive for design-conscience consumers. MSRP $299.00.

There are a lot of great reasons to use the cloud for storage; anywhere, anytime, any-device access to your information is a great advantage for those of us not chained to a desk(top). But there are so many different services, how could anyone know which one to pick?

I’ve gone through a lot of the offerings out there and made some attempt to categorize them into business or consumer. Then I weeded out the fly-by-night file sharing sites which are more of a way to pirate music than store it. Then I scoured the web for reviews of the sites (it might have taken less time to review some of these myself) and again eliminated a bunch of services that had widespread complaints.

One aspect of cloud storage that I find particularly interesting is the commoditization of hardware, software, and the services built on top of them. Because the prices on the hardware and the bandwidth have come down so much in the past 5 years (it would have been unthinkable to save music on some server out there on the Internet 10 years ago), the cloud storage market has grown dramatically.

This commoditization makes sense if you think about it. Hard drives themselves have decreased in price to where you could get a terabyte SATA drive for $70. Granted, we’re talking about much larger scale than a single drive, but you could buy a 3u rack mountable server with 24 multi-terabyte drives in it for under $6,000. I remember that on my first server I installed a 100 MB (MB, not GB!) drive for $1500, plus we needed 2 to run RAID 0. Just looking at those numbers, it’s easy to see how the hardware commoditization has driven down the price of cloud storage.

In order to test my theory, I spoke with Brent Miller of ZT Systems, a reputable commodity server manufacturer. I shared my theory with Brent and asked him what he thought of it. His immediate response was, “You just might be right. For a long time everyone was talking about using the cloud for processing large volumes of data. Lately, we’re seeing a lot of action around cloud storage. One of our most popular build outs is a 2u storage server packed with 2 SSDs and 24 hard drives.”

So, I wasn’t that far off with my theory. I thought the most popular configuration would be a 3u server, but I’m off by a u!



Here’s the three word review – don’t buy it.

Here’s the whole story -

My parents have a Mac and unlike most consumers they are very good about backing up.  I like to think I had an impact on that decision.  They’ve had a Maxtor One Touch III for a few years and the thing has run its synchronization and scheduled backups without a problem.  Now, all of a sudden there’s a problem.  I resolved the problem – it was some lame MacOS “privileges” garbage.

But before I resolved the problem my father bought a Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Portable Hard Drive at Costco.  I figured, how could he go wrong with 500GB USB 2.0 for $69.  Boy was I wrong.

Problems started before the damn thing was even installed.  Despite saying all over the packaging that this drive is compatible with both Mac and PC (“the world’s most versatile drive”), the drive is, in fact, not fully compatible with both Mac and PC.  If you install it on Mac, the PC utilities are deleted.  If you install it on a PC, the Mac utilities are deleted.  If you try to run it on both, you get no utilities.  Calling that compatible is simply an outright lie.  By that logic every hard drive is compatible with Mac and PC.

OK, so I plug it into the Mac and follow all the instructions for using the drive with a Mac.  It’s reformatted and the Mac restarts.  And that’s it.  No more nothing.  I know it installed Memeo Backup, but where is it?

After rooting around in the Finder I was able to find Memeo Backup and create a toolbar icon for it.  I ran Memeo Backup and it’s running its backup right now.  As far as I can tell, the Seagate installer is what sucks.  Memeo Backup does what it is supposed to do.

Now it gets fun.  The Seagate driver apparently disabled the Maxtor driver (despite Maxtor being owned by Seagate).  Oh goody!  Now all of our backups from the past 3 years are simply inaccessible.  The drive won’t even mount on the Mac.

A guiding principle is that a product shouldn’t do more harm than good.  The Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex portable hard drive has absolutely done more harm than good.  This is a faulty product that should not be on the market.

I very rarely write a review that is this damning, but this is a terrible product.  Seagate should be ashamed of themselves.

The very stylish drive is here and I’ll start benchmarking soon.

DataCore Software Super-Sizes Virtual Disks with Its Latest Storage Virtualization Software Release

Company responds to appetite for very large logical volumes (up to 1 Petabyte) as physical disk drive capacities get bigger and datasets expand.

FORT LAUDERDALE, Florida – December 29, 2009 – DataCore Software, a leading provider of storage virtualization, business continuity and disaster recovery software solutions, once again responds quickly to market demands, this time by stretching the size of its virtual disks from 2 Terabytes (TBs) to 1 Petabyte (PB).

“Rather than inch up to 4 or 16 TBs as others are considering, DataCore made the strategic design choice to blow the roof off the capacity ceiling with 1 Petabyte LUNs,” commented Augie Gonzalez, Director of Product Marketing, DataCore Software. “But we’re still frugal on the back-end, using thin-provisioning to minimize how much real capacity has to be in place day one.”

Performance-wise, these immense virtual disks benefit from DataCore’s 1 TB per node, 64-bit “mega-caches. “You can be big, and very fast too,” added Gonzalez.

Please read more about this feature here: DataCore Supports up to a Terabyte (TB) of Cache.

Why so Big?

The huge virtual disk requirement arises from two industry trends. As regards the physical storage pool, clients are eager to group multiple disk drives, each exceeding 1 TB, into Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) sets. With this release, DataCore storage virtualization nodes can control pools consisting of numerous RAID sets, each well over the previous 2 TB maximum.

Demand has also been strong from applications seeking to update and analyze very large datasets that in the foreseeable future will grow well past the 2 TB cap.

Extensible Architecture – Key to Rapid Response

The pace of DataCore’s noteworthy innovations is indicative of its uniquely extensible software architecture. Unbridled by hardware, DataCore rapidly adapts its storage virtualization products to harness the power of bigger, faster, and cheaper equipment within weeks of the technology becoming generally available. That puts customers in the best position to take advantage of future hardware advancements.

The new software release is available immediately. DataCore customers under current maintenance contracts are eligible to receive the 1 PB software enhancements at no charge.

About DataCore Software

DataCore Software, a leading provider of storage virtualization software solutions, fundamentally changes the economics of managing storage with innovative software that combines advanced functions and services with the agility and savings of hardware independence. DataCore lowers the cost and complexity of IT by making storage efficient, fast, flexible, fail-safe and virtual. For more information, call (877) 780-5111 or visit DataCore.

DataCore, SANmelody and the DataCore logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of DataCore Software Corporation. Other DataCore product or service names or logos referenced herein are trademarks of DataCore Software Corporation. All other products, services and company names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Dot Hill Virtual RAID Adapter Technology to be Bundled with AMD SP5100 Server Chipset

AMD to offer two new SKUs, SP5100R and SP5100R5, incorporating Dot Hill RAIDCore Virtual RAID Adapter technology

CARLSBAD, Calif. – Dec. 21, 2009 – Dot Hill Systems Corp. (Nasdaq: HILL), a world-class provider of entry-level and midrange storage solutions for OEMs and resellers, today announced that its RAIDCore® Virtual RAID Adapter (VRA) Technology will be embedded into select platforms based on the recently announced AMD SR5690/SP5100 server chipset.

AMD will bundle two new SP5100 chipset models with a license to Dot Hill’s RAIDCore VRA technology solutions — the SP5100R supporting RAIDCore Basic (RAID 0/1/10) and the SP5100R5 supporting RAIDCore Plus (RAID 0/1/5/10). With support for Windows and Linux operating systems, RAIDCore VRA solutions provide end-user customers with a simple, software-based licensing scheme that eliminates the need for hardware keys in order to leverage RAIDCore’s advanced capabilities.

“As the very low power server designs and other platforms based on the AMD SP5100 server become available through numerous server motherboard OEMs and distributors, small businesses and enterprises will have an inexpensive and easy-to-implement alternative to traditional hardware-based RAID solutions,” said Patrick Patla, vice president and general manager, Server/Workstation and Embedded Division, AMD. “Backed by Dot Hill’s many years of RAID expertise, RAIDCore VRA technology can provide our customers with highly sophisticated RAID capabilities built right into the chipset.”

System builders and OEMs that install the AMD SP5100R or SP5100R5 RAID solution will also be able to upgrade to the full-featured version of RAIDCore, RAIDCore VST, which supports a number of enhanced RAID features, including RAID 1n/10n (multi-volume mirroring), distributed sparing and additional migration features, by purchasing a simple upgrade license from Dot Hill. This upgrade enables full enterprise-class virtual RAID for significantly less than a conventional hardware RAID adapter card.

“Today’s multi-core processors and chip sets from AMD possess the horsepower and high performance capabilities that make server-based RAID more practical than ever,” said Andy Mills, vice president of marketing, Dot Hill. “By adding AMD core logic support to our new VRA solution, we ensure the most extensive support for entry- and mid-level server markets and provide resellers with a new source of upgrade revenue via the RAIDCore VST license opportunity.”

RAIDCore VRA – a Better Alternative to Hardware- and Software-based RAID

Dot Hill VRA technology enables server, storage and motherboard vendors to integrate RAID technology into their products by leveraging the power of today’s multi-core server CPUs instead of a dedicated RAID CPU-based, add-in board, helping to reduce hardware, power, cooling and support costs. RAIDCore enables host-based RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 and 50 directly on motherboard SATA I/O ports, reducing system costs and increasing the reliability of internal disk storage. The same software stack, with additional features enabled, may also be used for higher end SAS disk based systems that employ a built-in or PCIe host adapter-based SAS/SATA chipset, enabling vendors to maintain compatibility and a consistent look and feel across the entire product line.

The technology leverages a sophisticated RAID software stack, enabling today’s servers to effectively process RAID tasks without compromising performance needed for other operations. RAIDCore rivals the performance of hardware controller-based RAID at a fraction of the cost, in addition to offering enhanced functions such as enhanced mirroring schemes to support simple system backup and recovery.

Overview of RAIDCore Key Features/Functionality

Dot Hill RAIDCore technology key features/functionality include:

• Single, unified O/S driver and single-pane management suite capable of managing RAID sets on different controller vendors
• Spanned virtual RAID arrays, allowing users to create a virtual disk that spans across SAS/SATA I/O controllers and SATA-based core logic chipsets
• Native support for multiple motherboard chipset vendors, including AMD SB600, SB700 and SP5100 core logic chipsets
• Broad Operating system support — Windows XP, 2003, Vista, 2008, Windows 7 – 32 and 64 bit; Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and 5 – 32 and 64 bit; SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 and SLES 10 – 32 and 64 bit and Generic Linux SDK for custom integration
• Support for basic RAID 0, 1, 10 features or higher featured RAID 0, 1, 5, 10, 50 and 1n, 10n via licensing
• N-way mirrored volume copy using RAID 1n, hidden arrays and split mirror
• Hard coded licensing or web enabled software licensing framework that enables easy after-market upgrades and eliminating the need for a hardware-based license key
• Support for mixed capacity drives allowing 100 percent of usage of all disk capacity available

About Dot Hill

Delivering innovative technology and global support, Dot Hill empowers OEMs and resellers to bring unique storage solutions to market, quickly, easily and cost-effectively. Offering high performance and industry-leading uptime, Dot Hill’s RAID technology is the foundation for best-in-class storage solutions offering enterprise-class security, availability and data protection. The company’s products are in use today by the world’s leading service and equipment providers, common carriers, advanced technology and telecommunications companies as well as government agencies. Dot Hill solutions are certified to meet rigorous industry standards and military specifications, as well as RoHS and WEEE international environmental standards. Headquartered in Carlsbad, Calif., Dot Hill has offices and/or representatives in China, Germany, Japan, United Kingdom and the United States.

For more information, visit Dot Hill.

RAIDCore is a registered trademark of Broadcom Corporation.  All other trademarks and tradenames are the property of Dot Hill Systems Corp. or AMD, as applicable.

I’m writing a series of reviews for eWeek about secure ruggedized USB flash storage. These are devices like the Lexar JumpDrive S3000 FIPS, any drive from IronKey, BlockMaster, etc that uses on-board encryption and a rugged body. They have to meet FIPS 140-2 Level 3 in order to be included in my testing. Some meet MIL-STD-180 for being waterproof.

I’ve learned some interesting things torture testing the drives. Rugged is not necessarily the same as durable. I was truly amazed at the ability of the “el cheapo” generic USB flash drive to get the crap beat out of it and still hold data. The body completely shattered even when I dropped it down a single flight of stairs. The insides still worked. Smashing it between two 20 lb weights flat out destroyed it.

But then I threw it off the roof of my 4 story building.
The case broke off, but I could snap it back on the chip and it still worked.

I could bake it in the oven for 15 minutes at 325 degrees Fahrenheit and it still worked.

325 for 15 minutes and it still works

el cheapo after being thrown off the roof and baked in the oven